Since completing their twelve-pass circuit, the BFC team had returned to the research house in Lyons, where the hogback meets the mountains and the Morrison Formation gives forth the town’s famous red flagstones. Days of spreading specimens and recording data drove the field team close to revolt, so Carolinus Bagdonitz promised them a return to Rocky Mountain National Park, their original hunting grounds. Their collecting permits were good for another month. The members were working on an annotated checklist of the butterflies and moths of the park, and Bagdonitz hoped a quick trip might help fill in some gaps as well as soothe their cabin fever. Like their boss, not to mention Michael Heap, James Mead, and F. M. Brown himself, these kids had grown up on the loose. They’d joined the field team because it promised summers out-of-doors while their peers were working between walls in town.
“We’ve never light-trapped the high-country moths this late in the summer,” CB said. “Sterling, you take half the team into the Never Summers for three days. I’ll take the rest of the kids up to the base of Longs Peak. We leave tomorrow at four. Load up. And don’t forget the beer, like last time!”
Though the Hamm’s would remain in the cars at the trailhead, their packs were heavy with supplies as CB’s team trudged up the Longs Peak Trail. Spirits rose with the elevation as the Flying Circus clowned its way up into the alpine. When other hikers challenged their nets, CB said with a straight face that they were sampling killer wasps for the Department of Defense. After their interrogators hurried on, he said to Lisa, “Funny, isn’t it? We’re cool with the rangers, who dig what we’re doing. But these self-appointed game wardens think we’re catching all the butterflies, and they want to turn us in.”
“Yeah,” she said, “as they slap mosquitoes—as if leps weren’t insects too. Last time on Hoosier Pass, Nancy and I told one pain-in-the-butt person we were conducting a pollination survey—true enough, in a way—and that satisfied her.”
“Good thinking,” said the boss. “And after all, back at camp, we do nectar studies.” They made camp at Jim’s Grove and ranged out for sampling at Mills Moraine, Peacock Pool, Chasm Lake, around Mount Lady Washington, over to the Boulder Field below Storm Peak, and back via Granite Pass. At the first campfire, after a bottle of gentian schnapps made the rounds, CB surprised the team by whipping out Bel’s poem and reading it to them:
“Longs’ Peacock Lake:
the Hut and its Old Marmot;
Boulderfield and its Black Butterfly;
And the intelligent trail.”
One of his colleagues, a professor of Russian literature, had brought it to his attention, and he shared it, and its context, with the team. “I knew you were related to Humbert,” joshed Kate. But a genuine thrill ran around the fire ring as they realized they were in the very place where Vladimir Nabokov had commemorated Magdalena in his latest novel.
From every point, they shared the presence and the view of that great, improbably carved chunk, Longs Peak, with its flat top and flat face and every other feature anything but flat. It was named after Colonel Stephen H. Long, who sighted the mountain from the Poudre River in 1819 but never set foot upon it. Perhaps a better nominee would have been John Wesley Powell, the one-armed conservationist who first climbed it in 1868. Instead, he got Lake Powell, the abomination that inundated Glen Canyon and inspired Abbey’s fictional insurrection in The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Or call it Tahosa, the local Indian name for “dwellers of the mountaintops.” The mountain was scaled hundreds of times by Enos Mills and those he guided, by thousands more since, and was admired by millions. The next day, one or two hardy truants from the BFC became the latest to reach the summit by way of the Keyhole, a steep and stony route. The others worked its flanks. At night they all pupated in thick down against the deepening cold, as strange, hardy moths that generate their own body heat circled in toward their black lights.
The catch for three nights numbered only 203 moths, but among them could be counted several rarities, moths new to the state and park lists, a postglacial relict tiger moth with sharply striped primaries and hindwings of delicate rose that had been found no nearer than Montana, and a species of owlet moth possibly new to science. The cracks flew as to whether it should be dubbed Icyassus bagdonitzii or Longspikus marmota. Randy suggested Humberta lolita, since the moth had a slender, golden-haired thorax, and it had been collected by the youngest female member of the BFC, Elise, a new recruit to CB’s tutelage.
“Very funny,” said the prof. “You are not walking the intelligent trail he talks about. But there actually is a connection to Nabokov here. Professor Strelnikov told me that when Nabokov was a boy in Russia, he proposed a new species of Plusia to the experts, only to learn that he had been gazumped by a German named Kretschmar. Out of revenge, Nabokov gave that name to a blind man in one of his stories. And this moth appears to be a plusiine; we could redeem things by naming it Plusia nabokovii—though there’s already a Nabokov’s blue and a Nabokov’s satyr.”
“I know what Tiny would call it,” said Lisa.
“What’s that?”
“Bait!”
The third morning out, ice on their sleeping bags, food depleted, schnapps extinct, beer back at the cars, and diminishing returns setting in on the traplines, CB and crew decided to head down. Their planned route out, not exactly direct—as no one was eager to trade the high country for the parched plain below—would take them under Columbine Falls, below Ship’s Prow and the north summit of Magdalena Mountain, down that peak’s north ridge to the Roaring Fork, and thence back to the main trail again, with a fair bit of bushwhacking along the way. Sterling’s band would meet them at the Longs Peak campground, having driven back across Trail Ridge Road from the Never Summer Range. If they got there on schedule, there might be some beer left.
Late afternoon found the trekkers taking a break in the lee of Magdalena Mountain. The weather began to close in, and they all looked up and around. The wind got up, and a few clouds rose. Kate said to Lisa, “Magdalena Mountain! What a name.”
“Yes, it is. So Bel saw the Black Butterfly at Peacock Pool, but I wonder if anyone’s collected E. magdalena up there on the mountain itself.”
“Should be perfect habitat—rocks, rocks, and more rocks. We really ought to have a voucher specimen from here.”
“It’s too late in the season, too late in the day, and too cold, isn’t it?” This from Andy, the most promising ecologist in the group.
“Maybe,” said CB. “But that’s never stopped us before. Anyway, Mike Heap would never forgive us if we didn’t try. Shall we take a look?” That was all the challenge the BFC needed to delay their descent a little longer. No one was quite ready to abandon the field for the classroom, least of all the boss.
No sooner had they taken to the rocks than the clouds grouped overhead like a rugby scrum and a light rain began. They donned their army surplus ponchos, stinking as old rubber does, but serviceable. Then the rain slackened, and the sun came back out for an encore, as it sometimes will in the arctic-alpine zone, just long enough to put butterflies to flight and make a rubberized poncho a sweaty thing.
The butterfly in question was a chimera, a swirling sliver off the black cloud. So fresh was its image in his mind’s eye, it took CB a second to realize that he was actually seeing a Magdalena in real life. He hadn’t given it any odds at all, in spite of his pep talk. But always the enthusiast, he was never one to dampen the plan for fun or adventure. He figured that if he was able to get these kids excited about anything out here, long odds or not, he was doing his job. Who knew? Maybe the day would come when young people would no longer go outside to get their thrills. But not for now, not if he could help it. And there it was—or was it? “Look!” he called to the others, who were debating turning back downhill. “There’s Maggie after all!”
For Erebia’s part, he shouldn’t have been here at all. But his recent proclivity for the upper slopes, two alarming encounters with large moving objects, and his subsequent pursuit of a fresh female had brought him to the lip of the arête. And when the wind arose, he found himself lifted over to the north slope for the second time in his life. But unlike the other time, when he landed on the snowfield and nearly died there, he was now much lower, and most of the snow had melted. Now he was in new territory, and the weather was unsettled: one moment wholly threatening, the next alluring for a last forage before what could be his final night, if he only knew. But he did not. He merely followed the mercurial cues of the fugitive sun, as always.
“This late, it’s probably a female,” said CB. “Maybe we can get some eggs to rear them.”
Bagdonitz, fit but you couldn’t say lean, puffed after the insect, raised by a shaft of sun but about to take to its sepulcher before the rain came in earnest. “You come up from below, Lisa—we’ll double-team her.” Between the two experienced netters, Erebia fluttered, fell, and basked to suck the last warmth from the late beam. “Hold on—nah, it’s a rag—an old brown one, probably a spent male.” Then, “Aw, heck—let’s go for it anyway, for the voucher. The NPS folks will want it for the database. Old guy’s done his job.” Several members spread out in a circular gauntlet around the late-season Magdalena.
Deviating eastward toward the high ridge, they tracked the insect from perch to perch. Rain and sunshine and even a spit of sleet kept trading places, putting the butterfly up and down like an ebony yo-yo, and still they followed. One or two snapped a net down, but each time the elusive animal squeezed out through the rocks like oil. It was as if they each knew that their idyll was over, and only this hunt could prolong it. All Erebia knew was that something beyond his experience kept disturbing his perch as his old muscles grew colder and weaker.
“I think he went behind that boulder up there, Boss,” Kevin called as he went on point. “Maybe we can find it in the rockpile.”
CB looked, spooked it again, then followed the alpine down into a hidden depression at the base of a broad scree that assumed the angle of repose below the ridgeline. Having lost sight of the creature again, he scanned the rocks around him. At last he saw it, attempting to bask on a wet bare stone of little warmth. “What that butterfly is,” he huffed, “is tough.” He was of half a mind to let it go for its valor.
The butterfly hunkered. Bagdonitz approached, raised his net, and paused, savoring that moment of suspense just before the strike, that nanosecond of indecision that often costs collectors their quarry at the very last moment. About to clap his net over the brown butterfly, he heard a strange, gargling noise on the wind. It sounded almost human. He looked up, and the butterfly flew. “Damn!” he said, and took up the pursuit again around a massive boulder and across the open rockslide. On the last of the day’s sunbeams, Erebia fluttered feebly over the ridge, back to home territory, escaping onto the infinite and kindly face of Magdalena Mountain. Then clouds closed for good and the rain came hard, as if someone had pulled a plug in the sky.
Bagdonitz abandoned the chase and wished the butterfly godspeed. Then he heard the strange noise again, and it sounded even more like a human voice raised in anger, though he couldn’t make it out. He turned in the direction it seemed to come from, covered some ground, and rounded another great screening rock. And there, straight ahead, he beheld a monstrous spectacle: thirty feet beyond, a man was lofting a boulder overhead, looking for all the world as if he was about to drop it on a woman lying still at his feet. The man screamed, “Sorceress! Whore! WOMAN—DIE!”
“Hold it!” Bagdonitz shouted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He lunged toward the crazy scene. Some of the others followed on his flying heels. None could fathom what seemed to be happening. Scrambling up the rocks toward the gruesome tableau, they gave out shrieks, squeals, the flight honks of wildebeests on the run from lions, the roars of the lions in pursuit, all the noises a circus should make when busted loose in chaos.
Attalus wheeled to see what this commotion was that rose over the wind and his own wails. His foot slipped on the rain-licked granite. Slowly but irrevocably, he tipped, and as gravity took over, he lost his hard-won grip on the hundredweight stone. The jealous mountain sucked its own back down to earth. Attalus struck ore with his bare head one second before the boulder went to ground in the same place. His brain burst from his smashed skull, returning its only true knowledge to the lichens whence it came, and freeing its madness to the palpable ozone of the sane, sane sky.
“Oh, God!” cried Bagdonitz, struggling to believe what his eyes told him.
“Oh, Christ!” said Lisa, turning aside to vomit behind a rock.
All the others, for once dumbstruck, were thinking, Oh, gross!
Carolinus hastened to the woman. She was alive, but this storm was gathering force, and she lay wet and cold as well as bleeding. “We’ve got to get her to shelter,” CB cried above the whining wind. He knew that caution would dictate making her warm and leaving her inert and still against possible back injury, then sending for experienced rescue help. But given the danger of lightning and exposure, there wasn’t time for that. He ripped open his pack for the first-aid kit, applied a couple of bandages, and wrapped Mary in his parka.
“We’d better head straight for the trailhead and the ranger station,” CB said. Handing Randy his net, he adjusted his pack and collected Mary in his arms. She hung limp, her bloodied head resting against his big shoulder. Blood cemented her dark hair to his face as he carried her down the rockslide one stone at a time.
“Can you handle her alone, CB?”
“I am a giant of a man,” he said. “I can manage.” But they knew their leader, and behind his confidence they heard fear for this woman, so hurt, so terrorized, and, for all they knew, so near death.